The full text of Moby Dick fully annotated using Sidenotes.  An interesting use of Sidenotes, and one that I can assure you was never envisioned!

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Yammer. Winners of the TechCrunch 50 prize, Yammer (and others) are reinventing microblogging as an enterprise communication tool.

Is the enterprise ready for the social networking revolution? Sure, services such as LinkedIn have been targeting the corporate demographic for a while, but these services mainly involve networking outside company walls. Yammer is pitching the usefulness of social networking inside a company or an organization.

The networking aspect of the application allows Yammer to get a foot in the door through grassroots initiative. Anyone can open an account for free. This gives enthusiastic and tech-savvy employees a chance to make the pitch to their coworkers. Once the value has been proven, companies may elect to pay for additional features, including the ability to limit access to a range of IP addresses, or a company VPN.

Several of us at Arc90 are already appreciating the benefits of the Yammer service. While the wide world of Twitter may not particularly care that you are in a meeting until 12:30, your coworkers might find that information tremendously useful.

Of course, we’re not the sort of people who leave well enough alone, so we’ve already started thinking of ways to integrate Yammer with our own internal tools and services. Fortunately, Yammer has launched an API precisely for this purpose. We’ll be keeping an eye on the API as it evolves (it’s currently listed as a beta service), but we’re happy to announce the release of a PHP API Client library over on the lab.

Here at Arc90, we love Twitter! Okay, okay – maybe not all of us love Twitter…some of us… I mean, well, at least one of us! Anyway, recently in need of Twitter’s services for an office side-project, we decided to write our own client that would integrate nicely with our existing PHP libraries.

The default content type for returned data is JSON (we love JSON!), but all of Twitter’s supported content types are available (XML, JSON, and in some cases RSS and ATOM).

Sound useful? Head on over to the lab and check it out!

Also…

Our Twitter client was largely inspired by the great web service clients available through the Zend Framework. Zend offers clients for several great web services like del.icio.us and Flickr; but Twitter is conspicuously absent from the list…While we’re not really sure why Zend has (so far) decided not to offer a Twitter client, we may also release a fully Zend-tastic version of the client leveraging Zend_Client_Rest, Zend_Date, etc in the near future. If you develop with Zend Framework and would find this useful, let us know!

Thomas Roessler sent us a note that we had a pretty major security hole in our lab widget, SVN Notifier, that allowed unrestricted system access (yikes!) to nefarious commit messages. We spent some time in the code today and plugged up that hole, and made a few other fixes and tweaks as well. This latest release, 1.0.1, is recommended for all users (you can get it from the lab).

Thanks very much for the heads up, Thomas!

There’s a new ActionScript 3 library available over in the Arc90 Lab called RESTService. Now developers can make fully aware HTTP calls from Flex/AIR applications. There are some caveats for use on the web, but the desktop is fair game.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

It’s widget time in the Arc90 lab. For all of you Mac developers who are a fan of the Dashboard and use Subversion for version control, take a glance at SVN Notifier. Growl support comes along, too!

Check it out and let us know what you think.

I’m one of those people that goes to great lengths to keep my visible workspace clean and uncluttered…at any cost. I revel in the clean, straight lines around my desk. Open up one of my drawers and it’s a whole other story, though. Out of sight, out of mind. Yes, it borders on anal-retentive hypocrisy, but still.

It’s not a whole lot different for user interfaces. Sometimes, an easy and familiar way to “put away” interface clutter is to give users the ability to “hide away” parts of the interface. The Flex interface library is really great. It has just about everything you need to build rich, slick interfaces…except a drawer to put all my junk in.

Our own Andy Lewisohn has changed all that. Today on the Lab, we’re releasing a collapsible panel custom component for Flex. It’s simple to implement and nicely fits into the existing Flex UI framework.

So get on over there and grab it…and start hiding that clutter!

Ben Sgro, one of the newest editions to the cadre of arc90 developer extraordinaires, has created a new version of our MultiSelect tool, this time written in jQuery. It has been added to the Arc90 Tools section at the Arc90 Lab.

jQuery MultiSelect, much like its predecessor, is an easy way to turn an HTML select into a stylish drop down that supports multiple selections in a compact view.

If you are not familiar with jQuery, their homepage slogan is “The Write Less, Do More, Javascript Library”. The following source code comparision reinforces that claim.

Not only does the new version have a significantly smaller source code footprint, it is also easier to follow than the original. This is partially due to the powers of jQuery, allowing complex DOM manipulation and method chaining to accomplish tasks with less code while still maintaining readablity.

* Our lines of code comparision was done by removing all comments that occupied one or more lines. Whitespace does count in the total.

I’m a big fan of Cairngorm, I use it extensively in my projects and have always been happy with the results. That was until I tried getting it to work with Modules. All of a sudden, Cairngorm didn’t seem so hot. Not one to just let go of a tried and true architecture, I decided to come up with a solution. There’s been quite a bit of talk already on this subject, and my answer is based on some of what I found. It’s over in the lab, check it out: Modular.

We’ve all seen how beautifully the iPhone renders web pages. It really is something. But there really are two major problems with the iPhone:

1. It’s still too frickin’ small to surf the Web on until you zoom into to a readable level. Unless you really enjoy straining your eyes, you’ll find yourself reading “Printer Friendly” pages on it. The human eyes are the new printer.
2. I don’t own one…and neither do 99.9% of you.

Number two is really a deal-breaker here. While I doubt I’ll ever find myself spending hours a day reading on my phone, I do enjoy the occasional read in bed or while waiting somewhere…and alas, I don’t own an iPhone.

The kids at Arc90, in their infinite altruism, have put together a killer tool for browsing news on the Internet. It’s called Rio and it’s a dead simple way to read some of the most popular news sources on just about any Internet-enabled mobile phone. We’ve tested it on a slew of mobile phones including Blackberrys, Treos, Razrs and Windows Mobile devices, and yeh it looks pretty awesome on that iPhone thingy.

Just point your sub-par mobile phone to http://rio.arc90.com and bam a lean, mean mobile surfing machine is at your disposal. You can do one of two things here. You can either enter a news source or topic in the search box (like “lacrosse news” or “recipes”) and you’ll get the most popular news content for that search, all scrubbed and cleansed for your mobile reading pleasure. Alternatively, you can pick from the list of 50 or so popular news sources on the default Rio page. Once you find an article you fancy, simply click through it and it’ll also be stripped down for mobile consumption.

Rio is the product of a wonderful mixture of RSS (RSS is a great way to deliver content to smaller devices – it’s already stripped out the web junk), Live.com’s excellent feed search (pretty much nothing out there like it) and Google’s excellent little mobile web view. Rio is inspired David Winer’s River of News style of news reading.

Awesome work by the Arc90 team on this one. I no longer need to pretend friends are SMS’ing me. You can learn all about Rio by visiting the Arc90 labs page.